She must have been very loved. Your wife. Anna, she'd have had you dry and fed before you got through the door. You didn't make me ask. I made you stand in the rain long enough to ask to act.
My husband would have liked you, Mr. Harlon. Wade. Henry Vance had been nothing like his father. He had married a school teacher's daughter against the old man's orders and worked his own shifts in his father's mine to prove he could. He wrote poems on the backs of assay slips and was teaching Molly her letters and was going to buy a little farm in the valley when the boy was old enough to ride.
Then one Tuesday morning, a beam gave way 400 feet underground. The rain came and went for days, one storm after another, rolling over the ridge. And somewhere in those days, the house began to sound different. A spoon against a pot, a little girl's boots on the stairs, a baby who laughed when the rooster crowed. Wade found his shirts mended without being asked, and the clock in the hall wound again, and a jar of wild flowers on a table where nothing had stood for 3 years.
How come you never smile, Mr. Wade? Forgot how, I guess. That's all right. I'll show you. It's easy.
He taught her to milk the brown cow and to tell a hawk from a buzzard by the way it held its wings. She taught him the names of all four of her dolls, three of which she had left behind in Leadville. He never asked why they had left in such a hurry. Some questions Wade knew you only ask when you are ready to hear the answer. On the fourth day, Wade hitched the wagon and drove them into Cedar Bluff.
The girl needed shoes, the baby needed milk, and Wade needed to know who sends three men through a storm after a widow with a baby. The small boots, please. I can pay half now and the rest. No credit to strangers, ma'am. Cash or nothing.
A widow sleeping under a widower's roof. In my day, we had a word for women like that. Boots for the girl, a sack of flour, and whatever else the lady needs. In my day, Mrs. Wickham, we had a word for women who walk 40 miles through a storm to keep their children. We called them mothers.
Mama, he does bite. Lily's outgrown these. And don't mind Edna Wickham. She said worse about me. They drove home with the sun going down behind the ridge.
Molly fell asleep in the back of the wagon with the new boots in her arms still in their paper. Ellie didn't say a word for 3 miles. Then without looking at him, she said, "Nobody has stood up for me in a very long time, Wade. " He didn't answer. He didn't know how.
But he drove a little slower the rest of the way. 5 days earlier and 200 miles away, in a study that smelled of cigars and silver polish, a man who had never in his life been told no was hearing it for the first time. She took the boy in the night, sir, and the girl. Then send Pike. Bring me the boy.